Line your fortress with gold

A little kindness goes a long way

I have spent most of this week thinking about softness, and how powerful it is. It takes great strength and courage to make yourself vulnerable with another person, to love openly and enthusiastically, to communicate feelings without expectation of reciprocity. It takes guts to explore complicated emotions outside of the arena of one’s mind, and invite different perspectives. It feels like the most powerful thing in the world to extend love and care and consideration to another person, and to know it has made an impact on their lives for the better. It also feels wonderful if and when they do return the favour, but the power doesn’t lie in the reciprocity or lack thereof, only in the opening up of oneself to the potential, to the possibility. The raw act of telling someone that you feel sad, or confused, or angry, or hurt, or guilty or betrayed and the other person listening, absorbing that information and accepting it as a part of who you are, and how you operate, with no onus on fixing anything or squashing those feelings down because they are inconvenient or uncomfortable for anyone else…it’s like offering a piece of yourself and watching the recipient make space for it on the mantelpiece in their home. It’s how home should feel, I think: Soft. Strong. Accepting. Safe.

The reason I have been thinking about this so much is because I’ve been speaking to people I trust (of which there is a very small circle) a lot in the past few weeks, making calls and typing texts, frowning into my phone as often as I smile into it (these friendships are not purely virtual, it’s just that for various reasons we’re either too busy to meet in person or geographically removed from my current location, and it is one of the marvels of this otherwise exhausting smartphone era that I can connect with people this way).

And overwhelmingly, the sensation I am left with, after these calls, these exchanges, is one of softness. These folks and the conversations I am fortunate enough to have with them are a balm I spread across myself (ew, sorry). And it has led me to think about how rare that soothing kindness is as a quality, in this current climate, and how much I crave the gentle parts of people, and how often in the past I have felt embarrassed or ashamed by my own attempts to be tender, only to realise, now, what an enormous asset it can be, what a colossal strength there is to be found within. I have not second-guessed myself once in conversation with one of my ‘safe’ people. I have not experienced a churning belly, or shaking hands, or a racing heartbeat, or sick, sinking sensation that I am about to be punished for vocalising something vulnerable.

But softness is not something that feels prized or encouraged by those around me, often, or at least it wasn’t, historically throughout my life. As a child I was told that tears were unladylike. ‘There isn’t time for all that nonsense,’ I heard, frequently. Women I met who were endlessly kind and giving, like my Nan, were often teased or mocked, mercilessly at times, at family gatherings and the like. This led me to the conclusion that softness was akin to weakness. In order to thrive, one must be cool. Calm. Aloof. Unaffected. Hard. Tough. A bit mean. I tried that for a bit, but was never very good at it. I instead swung wildly from one mood to the next, desperately scrabbling for a foothold in a town where ‘getting on with it’ was the most respected attitude, in a school where weakness was pounced on by kids looking for any opportunity to minimise the character of others, because we all know what kids can be like at times.

As an adult, I feel as if empathy has become particularly scarce. Enthusiasm for things is often met with snark. Joy is gleefully squashed or corrected. We use the word ‘community’ a lot, especially in authorland and bookworld, but the community we harp on about tends, during its worst periods, to display extreme characteristics of indifference or intolerance or bifurcated, absolute opinions with little room for nuance or grace. Sarcasm abounds, but not the good type, with fun at its heart- it’s the bad type, the type rooted in personal vendettas and bitterness. Virtue signalling and ‘gotcha’ moments have become replacements for critical thinking and context. Reactiveness is the overwhelming modus operandi. The caution, care and time to think that you might employ in a real life conversation with a real life person is often lacking. And I think all this is slowly, inexorably changing our brains, for the worse. Micro-traumatising us on a low-level, constant basis. One never quite knows what the reception to a statement, feeling or observation will be. I often clench when I talk to someone on a social media app, constantly on the defensive. It’s not a grand state of being. There is great brittleness, fragility in modern, always-on living.

And it is affecting relationships in the real world in very demonstrable ways. Psychobabble can be weaponized without any understanding of the actual terminology being deployed in such bomb-like fashion. Communication can be inconsistent, pushy, wrapped up in anxiety, with an expectation of a person’s immediate availability that is unrealistic. I think the lack of kindness on display on a wide-spread, worldwide basis, particularly in reference to events playing out on the global stage, is creating something of a crisis of empathy, heightened only by one’s ability to hide behind a screen, and by a trending lack of accountability that being chronically online offers. Opinions are extreme, black and white, one end of the scale or the other. It leaves little room for softness. People feel as if they are in constant fight or flight, in survival mode.

Or maybe that’s just me, maybe my nervous system has been activated and I am projecting this perceived lack of niceness on a massive scale.

Either way, it means I treasure my kind friends even more these days. I have built a fortress around myself and lined it with pure, soft gold. I can cry with these people and it is not taken as a character defect. I can be loving, and this is accepted as a gift, not a burden. I can compliment another human being and feel as if I am planting a beautiful seed. Enough seeds sown, and the fortress will be brimming with flowers. I can be honest without any risk attached of finding my own words used, at some point in the future, against me. I am not judged or measured, simply accepted. I love being soft. I love being caring. I love feeling emotions, big, roaring, loving, excitable, uncontainable emotions, and being allowed to explode everywhere like a big old affectionate firework whenever I want.

I like it inside my fortress.

If you have become gold for me, I am grateful for you. Thank you.

Find your gold too, is my recommendation. Line your fortress with it. Bask in the glow.